Students at IIT Bombay "Opt for Optimization"

Written by Caroline / 25 February 2010 / Read Caroline's latest blog entries.

At Azeotropy 2010, IIT Bombay's fest held in early March, students will be competing on effective Life Cycle Assessment - the analysis of the energy and resources used in the complete life cycle of a product or system. It will be an amazing learning for hundreds of students, to understand more about the power fo Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool for evaluating true sustainability. As the organizers say, "By this competition, we aim to encourage the use of LCA as a tool for corporate decisions as well as governmental policy-making in India."

The exact challenge is: "You have to carry out a Life Cycle Assessment of the "Production of ammonium nitrate from Natural gas" to calculate the total energy consumption of the process and make a poster for the same. System Boundaries are from Cradle to gate i.e. from raw material production to factory gate, and does not include the impacts of further supply chain or distribution mechanism. You have to estimate "energy consumption per unit production" that have incurred (directly or indirectly) during the process.